even if the eyes refuse to let them go. They have been evidently used, the weak boys, to a certain degree of luxury, and their harsh occupation is repugnant to their feelings. They are young lads from the many shops of the luxuries of manufacture of every kind in formerly flourishing Paris, which have now closed in consequence of the ruin and desolation that has fallen upon trade. Those who have not shut up entirely, have discharged the greater part of their former servitors, who now are turned adrift in hundreds upon the _pavé_ of Paris, and know not how or where to seek their bread. Those hands have been accustomed to handle the velvet, the satin, and the lace, and shrink back from the contact of the rough wood and cutting stone: but starve they cannot, and they add to the wild motley crew of the _ateliers nationaux_. Those discontented affected faces are those of young actors, and singers also, improvident to a proverb, who have been left exposed to the rude buffetings of the world by the failure of several of the theatres, which have not been able to meet the necessities of revolutionary times, when even Parisians--even theatrical Parisians--desert the theatres for the club-rooms, and which have closed their bankrupt doors. What a change, again, from the illusion of the glittering dress, and the lighted scene, and the heart-fluttering applause, to the stern realities of poverty and labour. Among such men as these are young rising authors also, who have thrown aside the uncertain resource of the pen for the scanty but sure return of public charity, with a pretence of labour. The _ateliers nationaux_ have become the only salvation, in the suspension of literature as well as art, of the poor poet or novelist who does not dip his pen in the black gall of ultra-republican democracy, and earn a scanty subsistence as journalist in one of the "thousand and one" new violent republican journals of the day--for such a one alone can find his reader and his profit. But such figures as these among the groups are the bright lights, sad as they may be, of the picture. The greatest mass of the herd of so-called workmen consists of those accustomed to labour and to hardship, or of those who have been inured to play all parts, and fill all situations, by long acquaintance with all the necessities of crime.